However, on his journey towards the Forest his sanity had been returning to him bit by bit, and as such, all the things that could go wrong in invading the Forest of Bloody Origin flickered through his thoughts and slowly sapped away the speed in his legs. His sprint became a canter, his canter became a bound, and his bound became a stroll. Eventually, he had completely stopped moving and just stared off in the direction of the Forest.

He stood there like a frozen statue for many, many hours. And then he left.

He had given up on invading the Forest on his lonesome, but he had not given up on killing its inhabitants.

From that day forth, he was truly a nightmare to the Devils and Fae. Having gathered an uncountable amount of Blood Fiends to surround the entire Forest, anybody who tried to escape it had died a gruesome death. Sometimes they would turtle up and refuse to come out, but when they did so, he would heartlessly use his ability as a Progenitor to command hordes of Blood Fiends to run towards wherever they were hiding and then blow themselves up along with their surroundings.

He wasn’t able to see it, but he was sure that over 90% of the thousands of Blood Fiends that he sent each time would die before they completed their purpose. By this point in time he accumulated a small understanding of how the Forest of Bloody Origin worked and knew that so long as he could send in many weaklings at a time, although a majority would become nourishment for the strange crimson-leafed trees, a few would be able to penetrate through them and enter the living area of the Devils and Fae.

The only reason why he or other Fiend Lords and powerful Realm 3 Blood Fiends couldn’t enter was because they would be immediately focused on. The bloodthirsty trees would directly ignore the weaklings and stretch their hair-raising branches towards the best source of energy.

The last time he had gone in, the Demonic Blood Tree itself had directly acted. So he could only come up with this method. Sending in thousands of similarly low levelled Blood Fiends along with a few mid levelled ones in hopes that whilst the mid levelled ones caught the attention of the trees and died, the low levelled ones would have enough time to reach the Devils and Fae and finally complete their mission.

And it worked. The amount of Blood Fiends that actually managed to succeed, he was sure, were very low, but they were still able to do it. They were able to enter the dwellings of the Devils and Fae where they proceeded to blow up their own Magic Cores as commanded.

How did he know they succeeded if they were obviously unable to report back to him? Why, that was because of the rage-filled faces of Devils and Fae as they charged out of their Forest with the unmistakable emotion of vengeful fury written all over their skin. 

Ah… those faces. How they filled him with such glee.

But all good things must come to an end. After the Devils and Fae realised that turtling up would only cause more people to die and stopped hiding, Ghost had begun to indulge in a new… activity. Driven by the volatile emotions within him that yearned to mark its existence on reality, he had discovered… art.

He would carefully dissect the bodies of Devils and Fae alike so that he could obtain their noses, ears, lips, skin, bones, muscles, wings and more… and then create something new from the body parts. Sometimes it would be another grotesque looking humanoid with multiple limbs, eyes and wings, but other times it could be strange objects and constructions that had multiple mouths and ears all over it.

It was something so completely unprecedented and filled with madness that even the Blood Fiends would look at him terror, however, he didn’t care. The activity had become his favourite pastime and anybody who thought of him wrongly for that could become a part of his materials. Unfortunately, it was this favourite pastime of his that would end up becoming the final nail in the coffin.

On a day that he had least expected it, someone other than a member of his race had come to visit the Forest by himself. It was Zalucard, the leader or rather ex-leader of the Fae, but unlike his fellow Fae, he was still flooded with green colours and in fact seemed to have even more. Green aesthetic markings laced his arms and he had gained another set of wings. Now, they truly looked like butterfly wings. They were noble and ethereal and possessed a beguiling charm. On top of that, he himself had become immeasurably more attractive. His every movement was filled with grace and a deadly charm that easily caught all attention.

Clearly, he had undergone some sort of evolution. But as he appeared above the sea of Blood Fiends withs obvious intentions of visiting the Forest or at least its periphery, he just so happened to catch sight of Ghost’s newest creation. A beast-like thing with many eyes on its face that had huge red wings on its back. The catch was that those gigantic wings seemed to have been formed from tens of Fae Wings.

And he noticed.

The whole reason that Ghost had the confidence to slaughter the Fae as he wished was because he knew that they had somehow aligned themselves with the Demonic Blood Tree instead of the Phoenix of Envy. Their leader, who he had always known was still aligned with the Phoenix, should have abandoned them. He knew about the ridiculous loyalty that each [Creature In Green] had for the Phoenix so guessing such a thing wasn’t strange at all. In fact, if the Phoenix of Envy ordered the Fae leader to slaughter all Fae, Ghost knew that he would do it. And he would do it without hesitation.

But the look of absolute malice that crept on the Fae leader's face as he stared at him made him think of 2 things.

1. Perhaps he was wrong.

2. He needed to leave the Continent. Immediately.